Dating from 2,600 -2,700 BP (before present), this pot was found in a limestone cave on Aiwa Island, off Lakemba Island in the Lau Group of Fiji.
By this period, when the Austronesian settlers in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa were developing a distinctive Polynesian culture, Lapita pottery was often plain with no surface decoration.
Why is it that exhibitions with an ethnographic focus often use dark and sombre wall tones wherever possible? I recently visited the Voyages of the Ancestors – Vaka Moana exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, and you almost needed a torch (flash light) in there. (Vaka means sea canoe, moana means ocean, in several Polynesian languages.)
This was a show with some really special works, and a great story about the relatively recent migration and settlement of the Pacific Islands – a huge canvas of sea and sky articulated in the gloom of the gallery.
From the Museum’s Signals magazine, in a fascinating article by Kerry Howe (PDF) of Massey University, New Zealand:
The Pacific Ocean covers one-third of the earth’s surface. Western navigators started to explore it about 400 years ago (in the 16th century). It took them several hundred more years of difficult exploration before they had much understanding of the Pacific. Thus a common Western view was, and sometimes still is, that this ocean is vast, featureless, dangerous, and its tiny islands are hazardous to navigation.
However, this was not the case for the inhabitants. As the map below shows, settlement occurred between 4000 and 700 years ago, and the sea, rather than being the impediment that Westerners saw, was the home, the highway and the source of sustenance and culture for these peoples.
Kerry Howe’s article gives a really good sense of the sophistication of inter-island travel and discovery – superb ocean-going vessels constructed from local timbers, great knowledge of currents and stars, the ability to return from and “re-find” discovered islands (the so-called “triple voyage”), the spiritual dimension of story-telling; and secret navigational devices, including the method of “expanding the target” (by which the navigator used a range of clues, such as cloud, bird life, currents and driftwood to make his target island much bigger than it was).
